1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus, program, and method for managing images and, in particular, to an image management apparatus, program, and method that obtain an image to record or output it.
2. Description of the Related Art
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 11-234615 describes an image recording system that when an image data file is transferred from a first recording medium to a second recording medium, a code unique to the file to be transferred is compared with a code unique to a file recorded on the second recording medium to determine whether they are identical and, if the determination shows that they are identical, skips the transfer of the file to be transferred.
Japanese Patent Application No. 2000-040590 (which was, at the time the present invention was made, not published and not publically known) corresponding to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/784,159 describes an image information obtaining method, image information sending apparatus, and image information transmission system in which an image information sending party generates directory for individual parameters for storing a plurality of images categorized by parameter indicating the characteristic of the images and registers required file names and an image information receiving party selects a desired image file having a desired parameter based on information about the generated directories to receive the desired image file from the image information sending party.
The prior-art image recording system described in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 11-234615 assigns a different ID to an image when a manipulation such as an edit is made to the image. This system may be useful for a simple transmission system between a digital camera and a recording medium, for example as indicated in the publication. However, when an image is sending and receiving between devices such as a mobile phone and a PDA (Personal Data Assistance), which will become widespread, problems will occur as follows.
Typical devices such as mobile phones and PDAs often support images of different sizes (the number of pixels or color gradation levels) because of functional limits of their display. For example, if the number of pixels of an image shot by an electronic camera is 1280×960, the gradation level for each pixel is 24 bits and the image is transferred to a mobile phone capable of displaying 160×120-pixel, 8-bit-gradation-level images, resizing must be performed to reduce the number of pixels and gradation levels to the number supported by the display ability of the mobile phone before sending the image.
If an electronic camera sends an image that can display images with 320×240 pixels and 16 bits of gradation, the image must be resized to reduce the number of pixels and gradation levels to the number supported by the display ability of the PDA before sending the image. If images resized in this way through a number of devices to sizes readily treated by the devices accumulate in an image management apparatus (such as a personal computer) of a user, there would be a large number of duplicated images of the same scene (the same original image) that have different image properties (the number of pixels, gradation levels, compression rates, image formats, and other properties). In an image management apparatus in which an original image and a large number of its duplicated images are accumulated, it inconveniently takes extra efforts for a user to search for a desired image.
The prior-art image recording system disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 11-234615 assigns different unique IDs to an original image and its individual duplicated images. Consequently, when images obtained from various devices such as an electronic camera, mobile phone, and PDA are stored in an image management apparatus such as a personal computer (PC), a number of duplicated images of the same scene are accumulated, resulting in a highly redundant recording state. When the user browses a list of stored images, the similar duplicated images appear one after another, thereby posing the problem that they become difficult to manage images and organization of them become cumbersome.
In other words, the system cannot address a case where there are a plurality of paths over which images are provided and their scene is not changed (the images are perceived as the same image by the user) in the course of the provision but in fact they undergo some image processing.
The invention described in Japanese Patent Application No. 2000-040590 also cannot resolve the above-described problem.